“Perhaps the miss’s palate is not so educated as Mr. Dragovic’s. It takes a certain seasoning of the tongue to fully appreciate a well-aged Bordeaux.”

You just earned yourself a bonus, Kim, Milos thought. But Cino wasn’t the least bit impressed.

“I appreciate Dampierre, aged all the way from 1990. When can I have some?”

“Right away, miss,” Kim said, bowing and backing away. “I shall return in an instant.”

Furious, Milos rose with his glass and moved away before he throttled her. Cino liked it rough? Cino might get more than she could handle tonight.

He pretended to study one of the paintings his decorators had stuck on the walls. A swirling mass of creamy pastels. What the hell did it mean? All he knew was that it was expensive.

He sipped the wine again. Did Monnet and people like him really enjoy this stuff? Or did they just pretend to?

“You really should give the wine another chance,” he said. “At twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle you—”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle!” she cried. “For stuff that tastes like wet cedar shakes? I can’t believe it!”

“Believe it,” he said. “And worth every penny.” Even if she hated the wine, she’d talk about the price tag.

“Say, who’s this?” she said. “He looks like you.”

Milos turned and saw her by the bookshelves, holding a framed photo—Milos’s sole contribution to the room.

“He should. He was my older brother.”

“Was?”

“Yes. He died a few years ago.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She sounded as if she meant it. “Were you close?”

“Very.”

Milos felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of Petar. They had done so well running guns to the HVO in Bosnia, but they fell out during the Kosovar meltdown. Peter hadn’t wanted to sell to the KLA. He’d wanted to supply only the Serbs. Oh, how they fought, like only brothers can fight. He remembered Petar screaming that he would die before he supplied the KLA with the means to kill Serbs.

How prophetic.

To this day Milos could not understand his brother’s idiotic posturing. They’d always sold to both sides when they could. And the KLA had had a blank check from the Arabs to buy anything they could get then-hands on—they’d been willing to pay multiples of the going rate. How could he turn his back on such an opportunity?

But somehow, somewhere Petar had got it into his head that he was a Serb first and a businessman second. Fine. Milos would do the deal on his own. That was when Petar stepped over the line. Bad enough that he would have nothing to do with the KLA, but when he tried to sabotage Milos’s deal…

Milos still regretted shooting his brother. His only consolation was that Petar never knew what hit him and did not suffer an instant. The point-blank shotgun blast literally took his head off.

Milos had killed before and since—Emil Corvo being the most recent. He’d been careless with Corvo and might have been sent up had he not iced one witness to chill the rest. Who was the one he’d ordered the hit-and-run on? Artie something… he couldn’t even remember his name.